James Hogg's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the how-has-it-come-to-this? dept

Greetings to all of you Techdirt readers! And thank you to Mike Masnick for
allowing me the chance for a front-page post after I opportunistically jumped at
the opening.

Techdirt is a dependable resource for discovering where the heat of most
technology synthesis takes place. I shall be frank: skepticism, science, language,
dialectical thinking and argument for the sake of argument are all grand virtues
in my background. Whether you are of the thesis or the anti-thesis, it does not
matter nearly as much as your thought process. I shall respect, for example, an
advocate of copyright far more if he has taken the time and effort to investigate
his position and come to his own non-clichéd conclusions. Far more than those
who have believed in copyright solely because everyone else has.

Let us begin with one of five articles this week that caught my eye. Beginning
chronologically, we start with the MacGyver-esque videos posted by Evan
Booth detailing how to improvise the assembly of dangerous weapons with
items collected after TSA screening. The answer he gave to the critical question
about the consequences of revealing the information to the public was spot on: Islamic fascists no doubt already know this stuff and then some if Evan can so casually come across these findings himself (the better question is why fascists
have not attempted this while many were unaware). The true danger, if there is
to be one, lies with the public not knowing about the potential threats,
never mind them being even more hindered from coming to the rather self-
evident conclusion that most airport screening practices punish many and deter
few. If the danger presented by these videos is so nasty, why not a) have an open
discussion instead of shoving the issue under the carpet and pretending that it
will solve itself, and b) give the opportunity for the TSA to ban the items in these
videos as well, only to look equally ridiculous in the future.

There can be good reasons for wanting to not know something, but "ill-intentioned fanatics will find out" is not one of them. Just because you choose not to research into if you can build a nuclear bomb in the name of the survival of our species does not mean the worst totalitarian nightmares of our planet will take as kindly. You are far better off beating them to the discovery so that
you can prepare to resist it accordingly. Just remember this any time you hear
people claim that scientific inquiry is evil in itself, never mind common inquiry.

Next, we note the story about the malicious re-routing of internet traffic and its repercussions. If there is one ideological odor that can almost always show
it to be stinking of wrong -- I am tempted to just say "always" but for the sake
of avoiding absolutism I won't -- it is a utopian odor. We are unfortunately still
in the premature age of the internet despite how far it has progressed, and as
a result we still have a wave of cyber-utopians claiming that the internet can
set you, and keep you, free on its own. But the internet, like all tools and/or
weapons, does not free people. People free people, to improve on a well-
known mantra. And we have to remember that technology accumulates power
as well as separates it. For instance, here is one slogan you are unlikely to see
as you go about your daily lives: "CCTV is in operation in this area to protect you
from the police."

This traffic diversion shows exactly why all technology, even such as this
sophisticated mass-communications channel, is not infallible. To still be
uncertain as to how it is even happening speaks volumes in itself. The last thing
you want is for dictatorships or other dodgy states to take advantage of traffic
flowing through their servers for profiteering purposes or otherwise. And you
certainly do not want them decrypting the NSA-backdoor-encryption for their
own purposes (which they could most likely do, thanks to the NSA). Do not ever
forget: just because the NSA deliberately weakens encryption for the "security"
of the nation does not mean that everybody will use that tainted encryption.

Believe it or not, the large corporate tentacles of Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc
do not extend everywhere on the planet. There is no reason why an Al Qaeda
fascist cannot research the mathematical techniques independently and write his
own encryption program that IS up to standard, and will not be crackable even
if you throw millions of years of supercomputer-workload at it. David Cameron
was simply being frivolous when he invoked Alan Turning for NSA expansion
a few days ago. Alan Turning did not help crack the Enigma code by politely
asking the Nazis to install backdoors. And he would have failed miserably had
the Nazis been using uncompromised SSL. This is why you have to be ready for
the real possibility that technology can turn against you. Al Qaeda, as I have said
before, are not likely to be stupid. Totalitarian, racist, homophobic, misogynistic,
nihilistic and religious, yes. But not stupid.

I do have hopes that this attitude will pass. Ultimately, it is a reactionary phase
to the birth of the mainstream internet, and in a few decades we shall have
seen enough to know that the internet has its limits when "it" fights states and
corporations.

Next, we have LG having to embarrassingly look into claims that its smart TVs were picking up user data without users' consent. If I were older back in the
days of the PC really proliferating, the first reaction I would have had to cameras
being installed on the screens as a norm would have been "Sweet merciful
CRAP... Orwell was right about THAT particular deadly nightmare?", and
flipped my shit. However, we have been reasonably fortunate that what we call
"telescreens" have not been under the sole control of a state. But still, for the
most uncomfortable of reasons, we have been surrendering our resistance to
even potential eavesdropping from "user-friendly" companies so slowly
and passively: PCs, Laptops, Kinect, and now the TV on its own?

I really have to ask: how has it come to this? Why is such a monstrosity even necessary?

If I were an investigative journalist, the first thing I would look into as a result
of this story is how many other companies supposedly have such glitches and
manifest a great headline piece of my own. The first place I would start with
is Digital Rights Management within software -- a theory that works so well to
protect the unauthorized copying of data that we do not need copyright law
whatsoever.

If EA will go as far to split their games in half -- one half on a PC and the other
half on a server of theirs -- in order to protect their content, only to have it
disproved so swiftly and so humiliatingly within days, shows that the control-
freak mentality of corporations cannot be healthy, and we have every right to
be suspicious in the days of mass NSA wiretapping. Do yourselves a favor:
start being hostile towards built-in cameras as a first principled step if you need
to take one. I do not think Cory Doctorow exaggerates when he stresses the
urgency of watching out for a war on "general purpose computing."

And finally, we yet again have assaults on the rights of derivative artists with
Paramount's attacks on the public domain. I would indeed like to know if
there is any other property system out there that claims somebody can have
ownership of property before it even exists, because I certainly do not
know of it. And I also would certainly like to know why retroactive extension
of copyright of ANY kind is considered democratic: either a law is valid at the
time of it being in effect or it is not. We do not hold people's actions of the past
under the laws of the present. That I would have thought was a very important
principle. But no. It does not matter how much labor and work went into a
derivative work that was ready for release for after the original's copyright
expiry. All of it can be spat on and thrown away.

Then again, you can always work around the transparent nonsense of copyright
and start a viral Twilight fan-fic, replace the characters at the very last moment
and make tons of money. Mass scale infringement has, after all, still occurred
quite profoundly in this situation, yet the answer to stopping it does not seem
to come anywhere close to sane. Some others would rather pretend such a
dilemma does not exist at all.

when you have someone like Cameron, who is poor at his job, in a position of such great power, telling people how to do something he knows even less about than an idiot, it's time for a serious look at what the hell is going on!

Built in cameras

I remember being rather shocked when it reached the point where I couldn't get a laptop without a built in camera. It may seem a picky point, but I didn't (and still don't) want a camera that was ALWAYS available; when I want a web cam, I dig out my trusty old USB cam and plug it in. When I'm done, I unplug it.Initially, my response to built-in cameras was to disassemble the bezel and physically disconnect the offending hardware. These days, I simply cover it with black electrical tape - nearly invisible on the black bezel.

Re: Response to: out_of_the_blue on Nov 23rd, 2013 @ 4:07pm

I just wanted to say, or ask rather, when is everyone going to pull their heads out of their asses and realize you are slaves/serfs because are surrounded by like-minded folks that believe these cops, governments, authorties, etc... have power over you.

I'll ask one more time (no need to tell me because I already know): what district is washing sitting in? seriousely? what district?

Potential threats !!!!

"The true danger, if there is to be one, lies with the public not knowing about the potential threats,"

We ALL know already what the "potential threats" are, the issue is knowing what the ACTUAL threats are. You can probably list the 'potential threats' just as well as anyone else.

That's easy to do, and history helps you a lot there, again the issue is not knowing the potential threats are, its the ACTUAL threats they (and we are worried about).

If you need to know what the potential threats are, just read the news, and look at history, and consider any of those ACTUAL threats, could be 'potential threats', that is what security is about, everyone knows what the potential threats are, they work to find the actual threats from the list of potential threats to find the REAL threats.

Think of them like "potential suspects" in a crime, they all did not commit the crime, they simply had to potential to do it.

Or if you consider terrorism, you know what the potential threats are and you know what the actual acts of terror are, its not hard to work out from the list of potential threats what or who could be involved in actual threats.

As I said, you can work out the potential threats just as good as anyone else, or do you need to be told them by someone else ?

"Alan Turning did not help crack the Enigma code by politely asking the Nazis to install backdoors."

No, the Bleatchly park people and the British Navy attacked a lone weather monitoring ship off the Labrador coast and seized an enigma machine, it helped a lot, all they then had to do was work out the daily cipher.

They also DID rely greatly on "back doors" in that the Germans would sometimes send the same information in plain text and in cipher to different locations, this gave Brittan a "back door" making working out the cipher much easier.

So yes, Turing most certainly used "back doors" and break these codes...